Adventure Island — Attraction in Great Britain

VISIT DATE: SAT 20/09/2025 VISIT TIME: 13:30 - 20:00

Adventure Island is a fantastic place to visit if you have children and are in the Southend area. We’re based in Hornchurch, about an hour away by car, or you can also travel quite easily via C2C from Upminster, so my ex and I have visited a number of times with our daughter, starting when she was 3 (she’s now 6).

The park promotes itself as free entry, but no one is going to come just to walk through it, so the reality is that you’ll need to get a day pass to take advantage of the rides. At time of writing, it’s £35 for the day, but you can save £10 by purchasing online in advance. If you’re planning to go more than once, then it makes sense to upgrade to an annual pass. These are currently on sale at £50 and do not start until the first time you go. If your child is under 120cm tall, you won’t need your own pass, as they need someone taller (and at least 14 years old) to ride with them.

As you’d expect, during the summer, or on character event days, the park is very busy, so there are queues for rides, but going off season reduces this dramatically. We were really blessed with a quiet day, so barely any queuing time, all rides open, with the exception of one, which was closed due to a mechanical issue and the park and rides were open till 8pm. It was also a warm day - being inside the park means that you are sheltered from the wind coming off the Thames Estuary, so even when it’s breezy, you don’t really feel it.

There are a variety of rides, with plenty of slower ones for younger children, or those who don’t like faster stuff. Oh these, we really like Adventureville and Spooksville (which is the “scary” version, in darkness and with models of monsters and clowns, as well as appropriate sound effects), and you’ve also got stuff like little trains and boats and the best Crooked House ever, which has been an attraction on the site since 1949, surviving the great flood of 1953 and various ownership changes and developments over the years. I loved this attraction as a child and my daughter loves it too!

There are also a number of rollercoasters, with more gentle ones, then building up to Rage, which has a vertical drop and loops. My daughter is looking forward to being tall enough to do that, but she’ll be going on with her Dad when that time comes, not me!

There is also a water slide and an indoor area, Adventure Inside, which features a few more rides, including a traditional carousel (my personal favourite) and a decent sized soft play.

Staff at the park are generally young, so they have lots of enthusiasm (if we lived nearer, I’d probably encourage my daughter to apply when she’s older, as I think it’s probably a pretty fun working environment, as well as quite hard work) and they are also friendly and helpful when you need anything.

As well as the rides that are included in with your entry, there are also plenty of stalls encouraging you to spend more, like “Hook-a-Duck”, which my daughter loves. This is where having an annual pass is beneficial, as you get 20% discount on purchases, including from the food and drink stalls, of which there are also many! Personally, we recommend avoiding the restaurants inside the park as they’re not that great and there are loads of really nice local places a few minutes walk away which deserve supporting.

You can also spend money on a Funtopia gamecard, to use on the many games machines in the arcade areas. You can pay to play with a debit / credit card, but the Funtopia card gives you extra credit and allows you to collect points which can be exchanged for prizes. Annual pass also gives you extra credit!

Plenty of toilets in the park, including accessible and baby change. All in reasonable condition throughout the day.

Overall, we really enjoy visiting and will continue to do so; it’s a great day out on its own, but when you add the other nearby attractions to the mix (Sealife Adventure, Southend Pier, spending time on the beach and in the water when it’s warm enough), this is a fabulous...

This is a thoroughly magnificent, thrilling & fun theme park to visit with brilliant rides and seaside location only add to the appeal. The park is free is enter and walk around and you have for wristbands for the rides, which works really well and you can pay for the singularly or pay for a wristbands which are £25 pre-booked online or £35 on the gate. The best advice is book the tickets online as you will a lot of money but the prices are value for money all the same and is probably the best value of any theme park in the UK. The size of the park is very compact and there of a lot of rides to see and go on, all of which cater well for both for children and adults and all of the rides are very decent and offer a great thrill ams exhilaration to them and also are certainly riveting and pulsating. The rides at the theme park include Big Wheel, Rage, Axis, Archelon, Skydrop, City Wheel, Vertigo, Devil's Dance, The Screature, Ramba Zamba, Sk8borda, Over the Hill 2: Spooksville, Pharoah's Fury, Green Scream, Barnstormer, Fireball and Flying Jumbos to amongst others. Rage is an absolute blast and one hell of a thrilling ride with a steep vertical climb at the start before plunging vertically downwards at speed and then added with some fantastic loops to keep you captivated. Axis offers some fantastic exhilarating swings vertically upwards and downward to the point where you are upside down at speed adding to the thrill. Vertigo offers a great slow climb to the top before dropping at speed at intervals to the bottoms and is great fun. City Wheel is a lovely slow relaxing ride where you can enjoy brilliant views across the whole park and the rides but also Southend Pier and the sea and you take it all very slowly and admire it. Spooksville is a nice relaxing scary ride to keep you on edge. There is also Adventure Inside where you enjoy games machines and stalls but also great rides for the little ones and it is a great space for them and the rides in Adventure Inside include Carousel, The Pirates Plunge & Smiles per Galleon, Play Stack and Play Pod. Other things of note which deserve a mention are Adventure Golf, Funtopia and Hook a Duck. The staff at the park are very helpful, friendly, approachable, bubbly and chatty making the experience all the more better and there is a good level of security around the place compared to other theme parks making you feel more safer and prevents any disorder. There are plenty of places to eat offering food and drink at reasonable prices and there is a nice gift shop offering souvenirs at reasonable prices. Overall this is a throughly enjoyable, exciting, pulsating and thrilling place to visit, which makes for a wonderful and pleasant day out. Definitely well worth a visit whilst...

We done a spontaneous trip to Southend on sea and we had such a nice day.

We travelled from South west London on the district line straight to London Tower Hill than exit the station and walked 2 minutes to Fenchurch Street station where we boarded our train which took 54 mins direct to Southend central station.

When we arrived we walked around 10minutes through the high street towards the pier. The main attractions we visited was Adventure Island 🏝️ this was my first time but won't be my last for sure. You would need at least 2 nights to make the most of this experience as having two small children they will not be able to make the most of each and every ride/play area all in one day. It would be nice to break it up in two days that way they can make use of the full time and facilities they have to offer.

There are a wide range of activities from an indoor play area for the younger children plus a soft play separated for different heights/age groups.

There are multiple choices of food/drink and snack stalls to choose from.

The wristband for the whole day per person is currently £20 saving you £8 off the usual cost. The soft play was only £6 and there is no time limit. We also played in the indoor arcade where I topped up a game card with £15 and it gave us the opportunity to play upto around 5/6 games each for two of them as well as has the 2p machines.

There is hook a duck 🦆and ferris wheel 🎡 suitable for two adults and two children or a smaller one for the younger kids who may not like to go too high up. We managed to squeeze in as much as we but based on my children's likes and interests but next time I would definitely stay at least 2 nights to see the full area and even visit the seaside and other local attractions which include sea-life and bowling.

The only downside for me was that some staff members within the arcade were too laid back and a bit rude when needing help or assistance. I had two incidents where this occurred. It could be just bad timing but either way I expected a bit more customer service from them.

But I also came across 4/5 people who were very friendly, kind and made conversation with my children and made us feel welcome.

Southend central strip Do check it out if your local and don't be afraid to push yourself outside your comfort zone.

It was a very smooth and easy 55 minute train back to Fenchurch station and then we took the same route back we had used to go there.

I hope to...